The Defiant Son
by Mintbear
Summary: Captain Jameson Sevok Taylor reflects on his family's 'unique' historical lineage. One-shot.


The Defiant Son

My name is Jameson Sevok Taylor, Captain of the U.S.S. San Francisco, and I am 46 years of age. I was born on Earth in 2364, am the fourth generation son in the Taylor Bio-Genetics Corporation family dynasty, and am named after both grandfathers. My father, Richard, is a Human Biologist on Kirel IV. My mother, T'Sila, is a Vulcan. She is also a Biologist, and was a science officer aboard the U.S.S. Horatio when, during a rather disastrous away mission, she met my father and chose him as her mate. Luckily, he was so smitten with her that he accepted before thinking it over. After their wedding (on Vulcan), she left the service to join him on his family crusade to catalogue every species he could. It wasn't logical, but then again, sometimes Vulcans can be quite…human?

I was raised on various worlds, my father dragging me and my mother along with him, hopping from planet to transport ship to starbase to starship to planet. My parents raised me in Human traditions since we most often encountered and interacted with humans, and my father didn't want the headache of raising a son the Vulcan way while simultaneously having to explain why the other children were behaving so…irrationally. My mother resisted at first, but eventually saw the 'logic' in my father's choice. So I was granted the freedom to experience and deal with the full spectrum of human emotions and illogic. Though she hid it deep beneath that Kholinar façade, I could see that my human upbringing was displeasing to her. But she knew that being a "space hopper" family was hard enough on children, and that imposing a strict Vulcan discipline wouldn't have helped the chaos as much as she tried to convince my father.

And being a "space hopper" was hard. Sometimes, as a child, I imagined that I had a hometown, or even a homeworld out there. That I had friends and a graduating class whom I'd grown up with. Call it "traveler's homesickness" or "displacement syndrome" or whatever. But it was a tough life to live, continuously saying 'Hello' and 'Goodbye' to fellow children every few months or years when all I wanted to do was stay put. To…not travel. Ever again.

So, when I was sixteen and had finished schooling early, I did exactly what my parents least expected. I took the entrance exams and entered Starfleet. My father was beyond disbelief, beyond anger. When I called him to say that I'd been accepted (I never told him I tested), he sat there looking at me on my desk monitor in dumbfounded confusion. His face twitching as if he were trying to reconcile two pieces of information which should have cancelled each other out. My mother, of course, simply raised an eyebrow, nodded slightly, and said "Congratulations." I really didn't expect anything else. She may be married to my father, but she's still a full-blood Vulcan.

You see, no Taylor has ever entered Starfleet. Ever. We never gave it a thought. For generations, our traditional (and I'd say, addictive) need to absorb knowledge, has always been provided by various schools, civilian contract associations, scientific corporations and the like. The idea that one of us would actually *join* Starfleet was unheard of. In fact, it was a family trait of ours that we sneered at Starfleet for being "reckless cowboys". Yes, they defended Earth from the Borg over and over and over again. Yes, they kept the Dominion from conquering the Federation. And yes, they've maintained the peace for over two and a half centuries.

But they're still the military. And the Taylor family is a family of proud pacifists. Our pacifism is at the very core of who we are. We've always been champions of life, of living beings, of celebrating and continuing life. The idea that one of us would dare to don the uniform of a pseudo-military organization, and attach a rank before their name? Sheer anathema.

Yet I was compelled to join. Not by a friend, or a colleague, or fellow student, but by some inner drive. When I looked upon those uniforms, the commbadges, the rank insignia, I felt this…urge, to join up; to become a part of a greater whole. Yes, I'd been raised to cherish my civilian freedom to live on any world I wanted; to study and teach anywhere in the Federation I wanted to. But still, I joined Starfleet. Naturally, I was all but ostracized by the older generations in my family. To their credit, my siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and other distant relative merely looked at me like I was mad, shrugging it off and treating it as if I'd chosen to learn some Romulan musical instrument for the perverse joy of it. And I guess it was a perverse joy at first; attending classes at the Academy, learning protocol, discipline, regulations… But gradually, I noticed that unlike the many, many relatives of mine spread across the Federation, I had this sense of inner peace, a feeling of truly belonging somewhere; that no matter where I went, as long as there was a starbase or outpost or starship to drop my duffel bag, I had a home among fellow Starfleet personnel. God, does that still feel good…

Being younger and smaller than my fellow classmates, and once being called a "half-breed" by a less-than-tolerant and more-than-inebriated cadet, I was rebellious, and was nearly thrown out on several occasions: bar fights, unauthorized entry into restricted areas, arguments with instructors which bordered on insubordination... The list goes on. But I never actually tipped over the edge. I knew when and where to push my fellow cadets and instructors and when not to.

For my tightrope attitude and antics, I become known as "Daredevil" Taylor. Hell…during my Kobayashi Maru simulation, instead of trying to rescue the Maru, I immediately lowered my shields to surrender. When the enemy ship lowered theirs to beam aboard my ship, I beamed a cargo hold full of security officers right into their bridge and main engineering. All hell broke loose, of course, with my crew and the simulated enemy crews fighting it out, the two ships I now had tenuous command of blasting away against the other enemy vessels which had surrounded the Maru, and in the end I lost all but two vessels: the commandeered enemy starship, and (to my joyful shock) the Maru. I'd saved the Maru. And I'd saved…most of my crew. And I had beaten the simulation. Only two people before me had beaten it. I don't remember the name of the first, but the second was James T. Kirk. And he did it by cheating. I didn't.

After graduation, I rose through the ranks rather quickly. The Dominion War had taken its toll on starships, officers and enlisted alike, and promotion came frighteningly easy to those who wanted it. I served on various ships, starbases, even once in the Gamma Quadrant. (I'll tell you about that later.) and finally landed my first command on a Science ship, which made my family proud.

She was a Nova class ship, the U.S.S. Cousteau, and one of the first in her class built. She was a tough little bug which I relished commanding for eight years before losing her to an unexpected attack from a rogue Jem'Hadar patrol ship during a planetary survey mission. Truth be told, we won. But in the battle, we'd shattered both warp nacelles, burned out the main deflector, and had obliterated the forward three sections of decks two through four. It was my first officer's idea to use the Waverider as a remote-guided suicide-ship to punch through the Jem'Hadar deflector shields and smash out their main weapons array. Again, like I said, we won. And during the court martial (there's always a CM afterwards) they ruled that we did everything right, if a bit…unorthodox.

And now, here I am sitting in the ready room of my second command, U.S.S. San Francisco. She's far larger than the Cousteau, but it comes with the price of being far less cozy and personal. Oh well. So be it. At least a simple Jem'Hadar patrol ship would think twice of attacking this Sovereign-class behemoth.

I'm sitting here in my ready room, looking at medical records. My medical records. Specifically the medical records of my family history. They go back in several directions, depending on which family line I want to explore, but the one I'm interested in are regarding my family name: Taylor. I was recently diagnosed with (and cured of) a rare, genetic form of what was once misdiagnosed as Vegan Choriomeningitis, but has been more properly diagnosed as Type IV Rigelian Neuro-fever, and I've decided to use that as a solid base for discovering where my family line comes from. As I look back through the generations in my family, the Taylor branch stops dead in its tracks at around a century ago. Every other branch continues for centuries, if not millennia. But not the Taylors. We appeared from nowhere a hundred years ago, starting with my great-grandfather. I've asked my father and grandfather why we entered into the history books so suddenly and they couldn't tell me for sure. The likely answer, my father said, was that his grandfather's or great-grandfather's line was an offshoot of another family who had to change their name due to some…secretive Federation business or some damned thing. I never could believe that. All other families who show signs of Type IV Rigelian Neuro-fever are far distant from us genetically, and those who aren't have been dead for over a hundred years. None were related to us in any way.

In fact, the Federation Archives (for reasons still unknown) never could identify who my great-grandfather's father ever was. Few records, even less history. All they had for me to go on was that my great-grandfather, Jameson R. Taylor was born in 2287 on board a small Science ship, and raised by his mother on various starships and planetary bases (the latter part having now become a damnable family tradition, and referred to colloquially by citizens as a "Taylor Style Childhood", a "Taylor-hood", or simply a "TSC".)

As a twenty-something, Jameson started "Taylor Bio-Genetics Corporation" (TBGC), and developed "Taylor's Genetics Law', which states that: "The genetic biodiversity of a planet is both unique and shared throughout the Milky Way galaxy to a level that all life, both known and unknown, in our galaxy is related on a level either known and unknown. Because of this, all life is sacred to all who exist, and must be protected from destruction by any means possible, even if that means is purely informational."

To that end, he lobbied to utilize the Memory Delta library facility as a repository to store all genetic knowledge of as many species (rampant, endangered, or in between) as possible. He became famous, published works, retired from TBGC, and died on Earth. His sons, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have followed his work, multiplying and diversifying it across the Federation, making the Taylor name synonymous with both Biology and Genetics. We even have half a dozen or so scientific techniques and medical equipment named after us.

But we never, as I'm told, ventured into the Federation Starfleet. I've even read that Jameson himself was inexplicably offered a commission in Starfleet, but turned it down vehemently. That he reasoned he would not let himself or his work be hijacked by Starfleet Command and used to promote the Service. My guess is that he learned about the embarrassing Genesis affair and sided with an aged Doctor Carol Marcus, with whom he worked extensively on his research.

Since then, the idea of my family associating with Starfleet has become taboo. Except for me.

And now to why I am telling you all of this…

I discovered who the father of Jameson R. Taylor was. It took a bit of wrangling, string-pulling, and favor calling at Starfleet Command (Captain's privilege, I assure you), but I got the necessary information to test my theory, and I was right. Unbelievably right. In fact, I almost wish I'd left it a mystery. But my Vulcan half was too curious to know the truth, and as all humans are terribly addicted to mysteries, my Human half was aching to solve this one.

The reason why we Taylors never existed before the end of the 23rd century, was because we were not always belonging to that name. To be sure, there were other families in the Federation named Taylor, but none even remotely related to us. For we were not Taylors at all. That last name was given to my ancestor to hide his true (and, as I've found, historic) lineage. Whether it was from shock, shame, ignorance, jealousy, or a sense of protecting him from something, Jameson's mother decided to never reveal to anyone but her son who the boy's father was. And knowing now who the man was, I can understand. So she wrapped his identity within her family's, which at this point consisted only of her. This was the other half of the mystery which made accurate sense as soon as I had the first half finished.

The name of my great-great-grandmother was Gillian Taylor. She was a deep-sea Earth mammalian marine biologist and held an advanced Doctoral degree in the subject. I believe the ancient word was: Cetacean. Dr. Taylor wasn't even a woman born or bred in the 23rd century, nor raised then. She was a woman displaced three centuries from the 20th, a casualty of the well-known Time-Travel Whale Probe incident of 2286 in which Captain James Kirk transported two humpbacked whales from 1986 to their present day in order to communicate with the destructive Probe set in orbit and "tell it what to go do with itself". (The whales are now on display at the Cetacean Institute on Pacifica, and the Probe itself is…out there somewhere.)

From my genetic analysis, background check and research into my own bout with Type IV Rigelian Neuro-fever, I'm now able to confirm that my great-great-grandfather was in fact the legendary James Tiberius Kirk. He too had the Neuro-fever, which was at the time of his diagnosis, mis-attributed to Vegan Choriomeningitis. For me, it was a matter of comparing the Y Chromosomal DNA on my Human half to the DNA on file for Kirk and analyzing the genetic drift. And the results are conclusive: James T. Kirk is my ancestral forefather.

And you can see why this information was hidden for these generations. Not only is the family name of 'Kirk' strictly associated with the man in question, the idea that Jameson Taylor's parentage was not fully revealed, nor any mention of him or his mother, Gillian Taylor, being a significant part of Kirk's life, suggests that Jameson was born not only out of wedlock, but after only a very short "romance" between his mother and father. As you are now formulating, if this information were to ever be disseminated through Starfleet or the Federation… well… I honestly don't know if the lives of my extended family would or would not be harmed. Being the descendents (and the illegitimate descendants at that) of the famous/infamous Captain Kirk…?

That would be far too great a burden to bear. Though it does in many ways explain my hidden and rebellious desire to enter Starfleet, doesn't it?

Ironic then that of all the offspring known to be sired by the passionate and charming James T. Kirk, the one child to carry on his bloodline for generations after, is the result of a brief fling he had with a woman from another time and place. Of a union whose fruits he may never even been aware.

I must end this discussion here, as my first officer has informed me that we are approaching the Neutral Zone, and that the IRW Terix is awaiting our signal.


End file.
